Friday, March 30, 2007

I was walking Louise tonight and I was thinking, “I have absolutely nothing to blog about. I’m exhausted. It was a long night of poker---$61 win—and this week has been hellish with my little production accounting jobs that are all in the throes of fiscal year end. How dull. Little dull me. Dull. Tired. Chop wood, carry water.:

And then I looked down.

I love my dog. I just love her. I know everyone really loves their dogs. Like everyone thinks their two month old baby is super special. But being aware of these things does not make any of it less true.

My little girl dog is so sweet and cute and affectionate. But because she’s a terrier, she’s quite brazen and sturdy. She is a combination that I can relate to. Could it be because I am basically Irish and Italian---easily wounded yet tough as granite?

Whatever it is, she’s the dog for me.

So though it may have appeared that I had nothing to blog, the deal is---I’m all about love, man, love for my pooch. My gorgeous Yorkshire Terrier from some corner of the world that bred the very perfect dog for me.

Lastly. I don’t want to hear loud Rap music any longer. It’s just, I don’t like drums. I never have. Being a soft hits of the seventies kind of guy, I feel isolated in a world of pounding S.U.V.’s I miss Karen Carpenter. And there is nothing I can do about these feelings but accept my little white old-man pussy-boy taste. I try to be more accepting of music that I don’t like. I can’t do it.

I’m going to bed, right now, to be with my sweet dog. Sweet sweet amazing girl that was born for love. For me to love. Born to kill rats and then lovingly nuzzle up to me with her proud rat breath. It takes all kinds.

Paris Embraces Plan to Become City of BikesBy John Ward AndersonWashington Post Foreign ServiceSaturday, March 24, 2007; A10

PARIS, March 23 -- Paris is for lovers -- lovers of food and art and wine, lovers of the romantic sort and, starting this summer, lovers of bicycles.On July 15, the day after Bastille Day, Parisians will wake up to discover thousands of low-cost rental bikes at hundreds of high-tech bicycle stations scattered throughout the city, an ambitious program to cut traffic, reduce pollution, improve parking and enhance the city's image as a greener, quieter, more relaxed place.By the end of the year, organizers and city officials say, there should be 20,600 bikes at 1,450 stations -- or about one station every 250 yards across the entire city. Based on experience elsewhere -- particularly in Lyon, France’s third-largest city, which launched a similar system two years ago -- regular users of the bikes will ride them almost for free."It has completely transformed the landscape of Lyon -- everywhere you see people on the bikes," said Jean-Louis Touraine, the city's deputy mayor. The program was meant "not just to modify the equilibrium between the modes of transportation and reduce air pollution, but also to modify the image of the city and to have a city where humans occupy a larger space."The Socialist mayor of Paris, Bertrand Delano?, has the same aim, said his aide, Jean-Luc Dumesnil: "We think it could change Paris's image -- make it quieter, less polluted, with a nicer atmosphere, a better way of life."But there is a practical side, too, Dumesnil said. A recent study analyzed different trips in the city "with a car, bike, taxi and walking, and the bikes were always the fastest."The Lyon rental bikes, with their distinctive silver frame, red rear-wheel guard, handlebar basket and bell, can also be among the cheapest ways to travel, because the first half-hour is free, and most trips are shorter than that."It's faster than the bus or metro, it's good exercise, and it's almost free," said Vianney Paquet, 19, who is studying law in Lyon. Paquet said that he uses the rental bikes four or five times a day and pays 10 euros (about $13) a year, half for an annual membership fee and half for rental credit that he never actually spends because his rides typically last just a few minutes.Anthonin Darbon, director of Cyclocity, which operates Lyon's program and won the contract to start up and run the one in Paris, said 95 percent of the roughly 20,000 daily bike rentals in Lyon are free because of their length.Cyclocity is a subsidiary of outdoor advertising behemoth JCDecaux, which runs much smaller bike businesses in Brussels, Vienna and the Spanish cities of Cordoba and Girona. London, Dublin, Sydney and Melbourne reportedly are considering similar rental programs.The Cyclocity concept evolved from utopian "bike-sharing" ideas that were tried in Europe in the 1960s and '70s, usually modeled on Amsterdam's famous "white bicycle" plan, in which idealistic hippies repaired scores of bicycles, painted them white, and left them on the streets for anyone to use for free. But in the end, the bikes were stolen and became too beat-up to ride. A number of U.S. cities, including Portland, Ore., have also experimented with community-use bicycle programs.JCDecaux experimented with designs and developed a sturdier, less vandal-prone bike, along with a rental system to discourage theft: Each rider must leave a credit card or refundable deposit of about $195, along with personal information. In Lyon, about 10 percent of the bikes are stolen each year, but many are later recovered, Darbon said.And to encourage people to return bikes quickly, rental rates rise the longer the bikes are out. In Paris, for instance, renting a bike will be free for the first 30 minutes, $1.30 for the next 30 minutes, $2.60 for the third half-hour, and $5.20 for the fourth half-hour of use and every 30 minutes after that. That makes the cost of a two-hour rental about $9.10.Membership fees in Paris will be steeper than in Lyon, from $1.30 for one day to about $38 for a year.The Paris deal will bring the world's biggest bicycle fleet to the City of Light in a complex, 10-year public-private partnership.JCDecaux will provide all of the bikes (at a cost of about $1,300 apiece) and build the pickup/drop-off stations. Each will have 15 to 40 high-tech racks connected to a centralized computer that can monitor each bike's condition and location. Customers can buy a prepaid card or use a credit card at a computerized console to release a bike.The company will pay start-up costs of about $115 million and employ the equivalent of about 285 people full time to operate the system and repair the bikes for 10 years. All revenue from the program will go to the city, and the company will also pay Paris a fee of about $4.3 million a year.In exchange, Paris is giving the company exclusive control over 1,628 city-owned billboards, including the revenue from them, for the same period. About half the billboard space will be given back to the city at no cost for public-interest advertising.Based on statistics from Lyon, company officials estimate that each bicycle in Paris will be used on average 12 times a day, for a total of about 250,000 trips a day, or 91 million trips a year.In Lyon, according to deputy mayor Touraine, the city's 3,000 rental bikes have logged about 10 million miles since the program started in May 2005, saving an estimated 3,000 tons of carbon dioxide from being spewed into the air. Overall, vehicle traffic in the city is down 4 percent, he said, and bicycle use has tripled, not just on account of Cyclocity, but also because the program has prompted a boom in private bicycle use and sales.The main complaint voiced by riders is that at certain times in certain places -- such as mornings at local universities -- all the racks can be occupied, making it impossible to return a bike. "I'm going to start using my own bike, because sometimes there are not enough spaces in the rack" at school, said art student Cecile Noiser, 19.Company and city officials said that because the system sends in electronic data about which bikes are where, they are exploring ways to redistribute bikes using trucks to better match customers' needs. Touraine said the glitches are minor compared with the benefits.

Sunday, March 25, 2007

Today, while Adam, my Recognized-by-the-State-of-California-Domestic-Partner, and I were walking down the road in my parent’s very clean, lovely, lakey subdivision about seven miles west of Palm Beach in Florida, some horrible kid teen screamed out of his window, “FUCKING FAGGOTS!”

It was quite jarring. And I thought, “He must be referring to Adam and those two pretty mallards getting it on over there.”

I’ve been living a peaceful life lately. But really, guys, isn’t it high time that I carry a gun? Or maybe start a rap group that sings, “Kill Straighty and leave him in the gutter, boom, chucka, boom-boom.”?

You know---the only good new is things are so nasty when it comes to the Homos that it means something huge is going on. Of course, we won’t riot. But we must stand up. It’s time. Something big. Can you imagine some kid leaning out his window these days, screaming, “ LAZY NIGGER!” or “GREEDY HEBE!” ?

People out there---you must rise up and help us. We gay folk are less than ten percent of the population. The fundamentalists and the orthodox won’t have us. The homophobes of all stripes won’t have us. Black preachers won’t have us. The military won’t let us be known. But we need some help here. Loud help. Women? Can you jump in here? Midgets with a chip on their shoulder, lend a little hand? Club kids, put some clothes on and march on Washington?

Okay, it was just one little aggressive incident. But can you imagine how many of these gay people have endured in a lifetime? Five-hundred direct attacking remarks in forty years? That would be a low estimate. Twenty-thousand off-the-cuff "harmless" insulting remarks in entertainment and light social situations over the same span? Try five times that much.

Noel Alumit’s book, Talking to the Moon, was number four on the paperback fiction in the LA Times this Sunday! Talking to the Moon is about a Filipino man who is gunned down by a racist hate monger while working as a postman. It’s tragic, yet somehow affirming. His family is around him. The book travels back and forth in time and shows the stark reality of trusting immigrants coming from a naïve culture who land in this rough and tumble America. There’s a bit of a gay thing going on, too, which is always appreciated. Each character has a very unique spiritual bent. The gunned down man is a pagan. His wife is a devout Catholic. Their gay son is basically non-religious. Seemingly at odds, the family comes to the same point in their own way, reaching across time, death and despair.

My old friend from New York, Karen Rizzo, has written a book that is formatted in a very unique way. Things To Bring, S#!T To Do is a memoir, plain and simple. However, it is presented in lists. Karen always made lots of lists and she kept them. And from these shards of must-do’s and memory, she has created a really entertaining, breezy and thoughtful book. Huge things happen to her. She leaves New York City, a place she thought she could never leave. She gets married, has children, deals with the death of both her parents and gets on with it. And she’s funny. She writes as if her book is meant for her best friends. It’s warm. The unique format enhances the ride. She’s survives in a way that is both funny and graceful. She’s an unsung human hero. Great style here.

Wednesday, March 21, 2007

After lifting my head up after ten weeks of a kitchen remodel, I see that the war is still on?

When are they going to stop this war? At this point, it’s like some crazy person you know who insists on continuing their pursuit of the perfectly tasty and digestible wool meatball.At some point, it becomes all about stubborn pride, no?

After ten weeks of scraping and painting, I see that this country still hates the homos.

Coulter, that self-loathing drag queen with her fag remark, and that wretched Peter Pace, with his fear and ignorance, calling gay men immoral? I put down my paint brush for this?

After seventy-four days of sweeping, vacuuming and hauling off waste, I finally get my nails clean and take a movie break, and I have to sit through a militaristic propaganda film?

300 was so stupid and so obviously a “stay the course” war propaganda film. It sports a gayish villain and the hero dies at the end in a martyred crucifixion pose. How obvious is this crap? I don’t care how naked these guys are, running around protecting Sparta, the whole thing wreaks of simplistic, moronic thinking—playing to the blood thirsty single- neuroned heads of, well, children, I guess. Children and their trog parents!—because the movie is rated R.

All finished, I look at my kitchen and I can’t believe that we get to live in it.But sadly, I can’t believe the world the kitchen is in.

Monday, March 19, 2007

Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf was first seen in New York City just three months after I was born?

This is nuts.

I saw it for the first time in its entirety this weekend at The Ahmanson with Kathleen Turner, Bill Irwin, David Furr and Kathleen Early. Directed by Anthony Page.

It was so good. The writing. The writing. The writing. Stunned, really.

Everyone knows the movie. And I love the movie, of course. But the real thing, the real thing, the real thing!

Must be seen.

What they do so brilliantly in this production is they make everyone human. Vulnerable. They are mean and bitter and sad and aggressive and nasty as ever, Martha and George are, but they are not impervious. They get stung. And it hurts. And they counterattack for their lives.

It is truly brilliant.

Knowing that Edward Albee was adopted and that this play is ultimately about the dashed lives of a childless couple reconfirms my theory that the best stuff really is all just autobiography—though, artfully presented.

The language. Film can’t do that. Only theatre can do that. Film can fuss with it a little bit. But language stuff often comes off as annoying in film.

Kathleen Turner was brilliant to do this play at this point in her career.

The whole cast was at a perfect pitch. (Though Kathleen Early as Honey seemed to be channeling Sandy Dennis a bit. Too bad. But her humanity and her drunkeness were all there.)

If it hadn’t closed today, I’d say go see it. If it is revived again with the same cast or some other, go see that one.

Inspiring to see something that amazing. The language so shockingly great. The whole play so intense and so realized.

Thursday, March 15, 2007

But what I can’t stand any longer is the War of Programs gong on in today’s computers.

Google, Yahoo, Apple and Windows are all battling with each other. Yahoo’s home page looks like crap on an iMac. Google’s Blogger templates don’t always work well in Window’s Internet Explorer. Universal file sharing, while pretty good, is awful when it comes to music.

On and On.

Now, I know I am merely jejune when I proffer, “Why can’t we all get along and just make things work seamlessly!” in this world where competition truly is king and admittedly does foster new ideas and services. But all this innovation and slugging-it-out is ugly when I’m on the latest, sexiest Apple at the office and suddenly I have a tiny little field in an online log-in page and I can barely read the squeezed letters because Apple hates Microsoft’s Web Browser.

Personal computers really do feel personal. But corporations run the suckers, no doubt. And these corporations battle it right in our homes. And we feel it.

Wednesday, March 14, 2007

I had to be in Pasadena at 7:30. Lucky for me, I could take the Metro. How easy was it? Simple. I walked up the street to the Red Line. The train showed up within minutes. I got to Union Station and the Gold Line showed up within two minutes. The Gold Line is particularly enjoyable. My favorite bit is after Chinatown. The train picks up huge speed along the Corn Field (that park just north of downtown) and then goes over the Los Angeles River. It’s pretty dramatic.

To be able to go to Pasadena and to read the paper, relax and not look at the rear end of an S.U.V. is my idea of a vacation.

The trains were pretty full. I wish they were packed.

See the map below. The transit lines are growing. For those who do not live in LA...we also have these funky busways that operate like trains in that they are completely dedicated rights-of-way that do not ride in surface traffic. The only thing is, it’s a bus on a magic road. I have not yet been on the Orange Line out to Woodland Hills. I don’t know what’s stopping me. Could it be I have an aversion to office parks and Islands Restaurants?

Take public transportation in LA. It’s fun. It takes longer, sure. But it’s better for you.

Friday, March 09, 2007

Sometimes, as loyal Open Trench blog readers know, I will open a diary to the same date from twenty or thirty years ago and type what happened.

March 9, 1974 was a dull entry so it is not here. But I read about two months of entries. They were short entries because I was just a kid. But what was so sweet about them was how sweet a person can be at that age. It was all about my Nanny, a bunny that never materialized and tropical fish.

My grandmother was living with us for the better part of a year. She was in the middle of a separation from my grandfather and while that was going on he died. My mother got my grandmother an apartment six miles away and we moved her in. For weeks before in the journal, I wrote about my grandmother, the date she was moving. We all helped her move on a Saturday and I stayed over the first night in her apartment. I remember it very well. The towel she laid on the couch where I slept, my incredible sadness that my grandmother, who we called Nanny, was going to live alone for the first time in her life. I was also very aware that she was very aware that this was the last home of her life. It was also a bit institutional in a 1970’s garden apartment, subsidized by the local government kind of way.

On Sunday, I helped with unpacking and cleaning and it came time for my parents to come pick me up. And Nanny kept talking. She did not want to be left alone and in her anxiety she just kept talking and talking about anything. Picture hooks. Pots and pans. The stove. And I felt terrible that I had to leave her alone.

The next two weeks of entries, I wrote about calling Nanny. I called her almost every night. The first weekend after she moved into her apartment, I went over and “I helped clean the rug and had a lot of fun.” And my mother gave me a dollar for helping and then she gave my brother a dollar, even though he didn’t help, because she didn’t want him to feel bad.

The weekend after that was Easter and we had the Easter egg hunt at Nanny’s apartment. It wasn’t too much fun. My Uncle Joe came, too. I think it was a secondary Easter egg hunt. My father was good about dying lots of eggs. I noticed that my mother and my uncle weren’t thrilled to be at Nanny’s apartment. In fact, they both seemed itching to get out of there. I felt terrible that they didn’t really like being there because I loved it. Then, I got a feeling that I wasn’t supposed to like being there either. Besides, I had visited three weekends in a row. It seemed like Nanny was getting used to living there. I went less often and called less often. But I still called and visited a lot.

I was disappointed that Easter because I really wanted a rabbit and I didn’t get one. I kept asking for one and it didn’t happen. I had a rabbit when I was a few years younger. Edgar. And he died. Also, I was terribly allergic to rabbits. And I know my parents didn’t want to get me another one because of my allergies.

Most of the other entries in March and April of 1974 were about stocking and loving my aquarium.

I had an aquarium most of my childhood. I loved tropical fish. My best friendships with other boys growing up were completely centered on being an aquarium hobbyist.

It was all so sweet, the entries that I read. I feel so lucky that 1974 was such a sweet year.

Until I went to college and even during college breaks and after I graduated, I would take Nanny grocery shopping almost every week. We went to Italy together when I was a junior in high school. She was a very difficult personality with a pretty solid strain of Mediterranean bi-polarity. Not medicated. I got along with her extremely well. I understood her intense compulsivity and her loneliness. She died in 1989 of ovarian cancer. I visited her in the hospital every day. When she had a stroke during the last week of her life, she lost her speech. One visit, my brother came with me, and my grandmother, who no longer had the words, pointed at both of us with a fierce, protective look in her eye that meant, “You two take care of each other.” She died and I never quite got over it.

Wednesday, March 07, 2007

If one is a bit obsessive, and I am, there are so many opportunities to avoid the trap.

However, I rarely avoid. I usually take the bait and get my ankle in the steel bear claw.

Apparently, there is a little bit of computer patching, especially for handheld devices, that needs to be done for this earlier-in-the-year than usual Daylight Savings time. I am not a fan of Daylight Savings. I know most people love it. But for someone who already goes to bed very late, this just makes matters worse.

In my desire to dispel some anxiety over my distaste for the government messing with my clocks, I attempted to take some control over this loathsome tradition. I figured I would go ahead and make the patch for my Cingular HTC 8125 pocket PC cell phone. When I got to the web site that Cingular directed me to, sent to me by text message this morning, the site said, “But before you do this patch, make sure you update your ActiveSync to the latest version.” ActiveSync, for those who don’t know, is the software that synchronizes the phone data with Outlook on the computer when they are joined together in USB matrimony.

I did it. I downloaded the new version. And then I lost three hours of my life.

The joys of sync software are none. Of course, the new software had to set up a new linking between the computer and the handheld and there was still the old linking. And the new software needed me to delete the old for all this to work. And then after that, there were other problems. The sound note I made of the bells ringing from Notre Dame when I was in Paris---it somehow became corrupted and kept causing a sync error. This error was no big deal—however, I would have had to live with the error remarks for the rest of my synching days and I couldn’t have that.

And there was a sharing protocol that wouldn’t let me delete Quasimodo’s bells.

I kept tweaking around. Finally, after much resetting and turning things on and off, I was able to delete the bells and the error message went away.

All this- and I still never got the daylight savings patch.

What a waste of time. Of course, it was the perfect way to avoid writing. But then, I was so annoyed by Microsoft and so annoyed by my own nature to need things perfect that I focused like a dog and finished the first draft of a major television thing I am writing and then went to my friend’s house and we finished the first half of a first draft of our zombie movie. I was obsessive. But I bounced off the obsession into the original plan for the day. The only thing I missed was going to the gym. But isn’t that obsession, anyway?

Tuesday, March 06, 2007

There is something about being in your forties that has a kind of crushed-glass-and-vinegar-enema sensation.

But one must live. Lately, I have been looking at my breakneck running speed--if not in body, at least in mind. And I see that it is STILL about childhood stuff. I think this is why Ann Coulter's horrible comment got to me so much.

There she is, all smug--making a faggot joke. And people, though uncomfortably at first but then whole heartedly, had such a great laugh about it.I can understand her making fun of the ridiculous hypocrisy of someone going into rehab over calling someone a name. Left Wing people do come across as overly controlling and tyrannically PC. I applaud making fun of that. But to link that onto calling a grown, well respected man a faggot?

Ann is an actress, for sure. Perhaps she is our current day Lenny Bruce (with the soul of Ayn Rand). It's so interesting. And let people do what they want. (I use the N word in ironic post-racist constructions and I chide my Jewish friends for their clannish ways.)

But personally, I find using the pejorative in public assembly damaging. If I ever meet Ann, what could I say to this tall, blond, straight, privileged woman who clearly has a high opinion of herself? "Hey Ann, Why the long face?" Or "Man, you're an idiot. Your diatribes aren't even based upon fact." I think I would say nothing to the nut.

Adam, my recognized-by-the-State-of-California-Domestic-Partner, believes that growing up gay in the 1970's was the toughest time to be gay. It had become very well known by then but was still not at all acceptable. So, one was easily identified and then quickly vilified in turn. Of course, it is a bit gay to think that you are the center of the highest possible era of pain, however---I think his experience of growing up gay in that period was very difficult and his perception of it being quite crappy is, of course, right on.

Not that growing up gay is easy ever. And certainly, it must have been even more awful in earlier decades and centuries when one couldn't even begin to be oneself. Egad.

Pain is pain. And things change at a snail’s pace.

In general, it has been very difficult to live during this administration as a gay person. These right wing loons are bullies and their entertainers are mean spirited and empowered. It seems to me the only thing to do is to organize a gay cross-country walk that begins in New York, weaves its way through the most conservative towns in the country, and ends in Los Angeles. It will be the "I survived the United States" walk.

Monday, March 05, 2007

1) To David Mamet. On Bill Maher last week he warned the Jewish people of America that they were absolutely separate in the United States and to not let themselves be fooled that they have any place in this country outside of the Jewish religion. Why is he so paranoid? One of our smartest playwrights—and he suffers from paranoia? And wants all Jews to be strictly observant and religious so as to be protected and stake a separatist claim? Boo.

2) To The Disney Corporation. They are actually suing the city of Anaheim because Anaheim wants to build condos and affordable housing nearby. Disney claims this will interfere with their business. Meanwhile, Disneyland employees live in awful apartment buildings in the area, eight to a room. Affordable housing could help them. Disneyland thinks it owns Anaheim and treats their employees like slaves. Wretched company. Boo.

3) Ann Coulter. Well, it’s a big Boo to her every single day. But calling a respected politician a faggot? Really? One wonders what happened to her growing up. Was she tongue kissed by her father every morning? Was she forced to wear white jeans to school on heavy flow days? Why is she filled with so much hatred? Perhaps she is nothing more than an attention seeking dog and should be dismissed as the sideshow that she is. Or maybe someone should put a bullet in her head. She is completely awful. BOO.

Thursday, March 01, 2007

One is above ground for people. It’s public. It’s clean. And if you want to be left in peace while you travel, you press a button and the Lucite comes down around you. One could enter these trains. Or, one could have a pod and press in a destination and the pod joins into the stream of other pods. Easy enough.

But the other system I have thought about for years and the one I really want to happen is:The underground railroad for crap. Yes. Anything you buy gets a code put on it and it goes underground with all the other stuff that people by and when you get home, there it is in your personal underground station. All items would be carried on a conveyer belt (up to a certain weight) and the little conveyer belts only turn on when necessary. The conveyer belt from the street to the building where you live would only turn on if there is a package for you. This would save an enormous amount of energy.

There would be larger tunnels for freight...freight depots would be built around cities and farms. There would be no need for trucks. There would be no need for air pollution.

People would live and travel above ground in fresh air. Personal goods and freight would travel below.